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Jul 23, 2016

Absolutely Fabulous (1992-1995, and many specials afterwards) was Thelma and Louise on steroids. And lots of stoli. It starred Jennifer Saunders as "Eddy" Edina Monsoon, a self-centered, celebrity-obsessed, fad-chasing glamorista who wasn't nearly as hip, chic, or well-connected as she thought she was ("Names, darling! I need names!").

And Joanna Lumley as her best friend Patsy, a boozing, promiscuous fashion photographer or editor ("He wanted to show me his..er...portfolio").

Reigning the two in were Edina's daughter Saffron, or Saffy (Julia Sawalha, left), a level-headed college student with a dark side of her own, and her mother (June Whitfield), dotty and conniving at the same time. Patsy and Saffy were each jealous of the other's place in Edina's life, and sniped at each other constantly.

Episodes could go off the deep end, as when Patsy sold Saffron into slavery in Morocco or Edina adopted a child to make Saffron jealous, but mostly they involved relationship issues: Eddy's 40th birthday; a visit by Patsy's older, crueller sister Jackie; Patsy takes a job in New York, thus threatening to break up the duo.

In spite of the occasional mention of heterosexual exploits, Patsy and Edina were most obviously life partners. They may exploit others, but they never waivered in their commitment to each other.

There were also many quirky supporting characters, such as the butch-femme straight couple, Bo (Mo Gaffney) and Marshall (Christopher Ryan)

But it was the over-the-top camp that made Ab Fab a gay classic. On Halloween in 1993, half of the drag queens in West Hollywood were dressed as Patsy.

Everyone was casually bisexual. Patsy revealed that she had undergone a sex-change operation, but "it fell off."

And there were ample gay men and lesbians among the duo's friends and clients. In the 2003 special "Gay," we discover that Eddy's son Serge (Josh Hamilton, left) ran away to New York because Eddy couldn't accept him as gay-and-boring; he wasn't flamboyant enough to be a chic shopping accessory.

Not a lot of beefcake in this female-oriented show -- just an occasional male model or shirtless boyfriend. But who cares? Patsy and Edina were absolutely fabulous all by themselves.

Teen idol careers are painfully short, 3 or 4 years. The 12 year olds who discover your picture in Teen Beat and moon over your bubblegum pop will eventually turn into teenagers, start dating boys of their own, and relegate you to childhood memories. Unless you can reinvent yourself as a adult performer, you've had it.

David Cassidy, whose last charting single was in 1972 in the U.S. (though he was still selling records in Germany and the U.K.), tried to reinvent himself as a serious dramatic actor. In 1978, he played a cop who goes undercover as a high school student in "A Chance to Live", an episode of Police Story.

He was nominated for an Emmy, and NBC was so impressed that they created a series for his character, giving undercover cop Dan Shay (David) a wife, a daughter, and a superior officer to butt heads with (Simon Oakland as Sgt. Abrams).

Unfortunately, they didn't learn from the example of Bobby Sherman in Getting Together.They made a lot of mistakes.

Mistake #1: The title. Everybody thought that David would be playing himself, a sort of teen idol secret agent.

Mistake #2: the wife and kids. Teen idols should be single, so the fans can fantasize about getting them for themselves.

Mistake #3: his costumes. All tight jeans and shirts unbuttoned to the navel. It was the style in 1978, and it was nice to see a basket, but it didn't mesh with the androgynous shoulder-length hair.

Mistake #4: the middle aged superior officer (Simon Oakland). Too hippie vs. establishment for the 1978. Dan should have had a peer partner.

Mistake #5: instead of going undercover in a high school, Dan went undercover as a different ludicrous character every week, to snoop out a different ludicrous crime. See if you can tell which is which:

Mistakes #6 and #7: Premiering it on Thursday nights, opposite the youth-hits Barney Miller and Soap, in November, when everyone is too busy preparing for the holidays to try out new tv shows.

Eight episodes aired during the Thanksgiving-Christmas season 1978, and another two were burned off in the summer of 1979, and David Cassidy: Man Undercover went into the records of "worst series ever."

David Cassidy found the experience painful. After 1979 he concentrated on his music, and limited his tv and film work to occasional guest star spots. Recently he starred in Ruby and the Rockits with his brother Patrick and current teen idol Austin Butler.

It's the day after Christmas in seventh grade. We're visiting my parents' relatives in Indiana. Today we drive out to the farmhouse near Garrett to visit my Grandpa Prater, my mother's father, and bring him his Christmas presents.

Grandpa Prater is 70 years old, but still big and rugged, with thick arms and shoulders and huge hands. He wears overalls, sometimes with a white t-shirt underneath, sometimes without, so you could see his hard round pecs dusted with white hair.

He moved from Kentucky to Indiana with his family in 1942, to take advantage of factory jobs during World War II. Now he is widowed, and all of his kids have moved out except Uncle Edd, who acts more like his brother than his son.

There's no car in the driveway, and no one answers when we knock, so we figure that they're out, at the store or visiting friends in town. We drive down the road about half a mile to the Trailer in the Deep Woods, to visit my Cousin Buster and his parents and wait for them to return.

Cousin Buster shows me the guitar he got for Christmas, and tries to play "Your Mama Don't Dance," by Loggins and Messina. He doesn't do well. "I should have asked for a banjo," he says. "Man, I could really howl on that box."

"Why don't you ask Grandpa if you can borrow his?"

Somehow we decide that it would be a good idea to sneak into the farmhouse while he's gone and "borrow" the banjo.

Jul 22, 2016

There once was a man who loved a woman
She was the one he slew a dragon for.

The American musical has traditionally been a vehicle for unvarnished heterosexism, two interspliced boy-meets-girl plotlines and as many songs about "love! love! love!" as a Cody Simpson album. But with so many gay actors, writers, directors, choreographers, and producers, gay subtexts invariably sneak in.

The Pajama Game (1954)ran for 1,063 performances on Broadway, with revivals in 1973 and 2005, and a movie version in 1957 (starring Doris Day). The title sounds risque, but it's actually about the Sleeptite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Gay subtext #1: Hines seems more interested in Sid than Gladys.
Gay subtext #2: Gladys has many masculine-coded traits, veering close to a stereotypic movie lesbian.
Gay subtext #3: Beefcake. At the end of the movie, Sid and Babe unveil the new pajama style, Sid shirtless, barechested, and muscular, so risque that it was shocking in 1954.

John Raitt (left) is the archetypal Sid, appearing in both the original Broadway and the movie versions. University performers include Chris Ellis (top photo) and Stephen Boyd (above).

The Pajama Game is a favorite of high school and college drama clubs, for both actors and fans who can see their favorite hunk semi-nude. Sometimes more skittish directors insist that he perform with a t-shirt instead, as Harry Connick Jr. did in the recent Broadway revival.

Jul 21, 2016

When I was a kid, our Sunday school classes went over all the great Old Testament stories of skullduggery, betrayal, abandonment, and murder (and those were the heroes). In junior high, they were gradually phased out in favor of up to date "raps" about the evils of rock music and Roman Catholicism, but for a few years it was a wild ride.

My favorite hero/villain of the Old Testament was Jacob, son of Isaac. It had deceit, sibling rivalry, and weird paranormal experiences. .

1. Esau, the eldest son, gets the birthright, but when he comes in famished from hunting, the sneaky Jacob tricks him into trading it over in exchange for a "mess of pottage." Surely that constitutes duress.

2. He sneakily pretends to be Esau to get his father's blessing, too (his conniving Mother puts him up to it).

3. By this point, everyone is mad at him, so he runs away. On the road, has some weird visions, like a Stairway to Heaven, with angels climbing up and down it. Weird!

4. And, in the middle of the wilderness, an angel appears and wrestles with him all night. That's quite a lengthy wrestling bout! The angel wins by wounding Jacob on the thigh.

Luluzinha is 15 years old, intelligent, resourceful, with a passion for dots (um, that's another character altogether). She has a number of boyfriends, including Zico, Patrick, Ball, and the vampire Vincinius.

Ball (Tubby) is a slim, athletic aspiring rock musician, lead guitarist for the band Loki. He is in love with Luluzinha, although he dates a number of girls.

Glorinha (Gloria) is into shopping and fashion. She has several boyfriends.

Annie is a video game and computer geek. She is dating Icarus.

Alvinho (Alvin) is a rebellious preteen who aspires to become a surfer. He is dating Lila.

So far so heteronormative. But in 2013, Edgar arrives, a member of Ball's band. He soon announces to the gang that he was gay, and started dating Fabio. In issue 57, they kiss.

The gang is nonchalant, but Edgar's homophobic father is horrified, and assaults him. Vicente, the school director, steps in.

On the whole, it's a "coming out" episode like what we saw on tv frequently during the 1980s, but in 2013 in a Brazilian children's comic.

Jul 19, 2016

My Grandpa Prater, my mother's father, was a big man, towering over my father and uncles, and rugged even in his mid-60s, with thick arms and shoulders and huge hands. He wore overalls, sometimes with a white t-shirt underneath, sometimes without, so you could see his hard round pecs dusted with white hair.

He was a man's man, always doing something with his sons and sons-in law and various friends: hunting, fishing, playing horseshoes, working on cars.

He had a thick Kentucky accent that was virtually incomprehensible, but he didn't say much anyway. When the family gathered in the living room to play cards and exchange gossip, he kept silent unless someone asked him a question. The indoors was uncomfortably stuffy; he'd rather be out with his friends and some dogs on a midnight hunt.

The only time he perked up was when someone asked him to play his banjo. Then he'd play "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" or "Cotton Eyed Joe," as good, and as fast, as the Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs at the Grand Ole Opry.

There was a sadness about him that I didn't pick up on when I was a kid. Something deep and dark, that the little joys of everyday life couldn't penetrate. It wasn't just that he had lost his wife, three older brothers, and four of his eleven children. It was a dream deferred, a hope from his childhood that he abandoned.

More about that later.

I have two erotic stories about Grandpa Prater. The first is about judo.

June 1971

The summer after fifth grade. We're all at the farmhouse, but my brother and Cousin Buster are off somewhere, so I'm the only kid. Dad and my uncles are up by the Old House, playing horseshoes. I'm not allowed because I'm too little. I don't necessarily like horseshoes, but I like hanging out with the men, especially when my only other option is sitting in the farmhouse with my Mom and aunts, gossipping about who did what with whom thirty years ago.

I'm wandering aimlessly through the side yard and the rhubarb patch when Grandpa Prater appears, wraps his huge paw around my shoulder, and says "I hear you're taking wrestling."

(I'm not going to try to transliterate his incomprehensible Kentucky accent. Use your imagination.)

I disliked He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983-85), the cartoon based on the Mattel toys.

First of all, the term "he-man" roiled me. Whether you measure it by chromosomes, hormones, a penis, or external affect, a man is a man. There's no degrees, there's no "he does this, so he's more of a man than you." Everything men do is what men do, which is everything except give birth.

This particular He-Man is just a run-of-the-mill 1980s sword-and-sorcery hunk, except he has the rather Biblical title Prince Adam of Eternia (Holy Garden of Eden, Batman!).

The Elders of Eternia, who live in Castle Greyskull, decided that they needed a hero, so they chose Prince Adam. To become a superhero, he raises his penis...um, I mean his sword...and yells "By the Power of Grayskull, I am the Power!"

He then transforms, Shazam-like, into...well, exactly the same person. He just takes his clothes off and puts a Christian cross on his chest.

His main nemesis is Skeletor, a hyperbolic skull-faced guy with purple muscles and a bone-cross, who wants to..well, you know.

His main allies are:
1. Battle Cat
2. The Girl, aka Teela the "Warrior Goddess"
3. The Sorceress, who may be Teela, too. All women are the same woman, the Eternal Feminine.
4. Orko, a weird ghost-thing who acts as comic relief. If you need any.

But he also fights with the Masters of the Universe -- rather a hyperbolic title, since they really defend only Planet Eternia. They include characters with bizarre names like Man-E-Faces, Buzz Off, Snout Spout, Sir Laser-Lot, Wun-Dar, and Sy-Klone (I'm not making this up).

Every episode is a morality play, with the moral helpfully provided at the end.

Ileena is drugged by the evil wizard Jarvon. Moral: Drugs are bad.
He-Man and Skeletor must team up to defeat the evil plant-monster Evilseed. Moral: Cooperation is good.
A villain named Darkdream blots out Eternia's sun. Moral: Nightmares can't hurt you.
Often the moral had only a very loose relationship to the story:

Skeletor steals Castle Greyskull. Moral: Overeating is bad.
He-Man is forced to fight as a gladiator. Moral: Books are better than tv.

Adam and Teela explore an old castle and awaken its residents from an enchanted sleep. Moral: You should go to bed at the same time each day.
Seriously, who was watching this?

Somebody was. In 1985, a spin-off series introduced Prince Adam's twin sister Adora, who was kidnapped as a baby and raised on Etheria. She becomes She-Ra, Princess of Power (What, no She-Woman?), with comrades named Cowl, Bow, Frosta, Perfuma, Castaspella (really?), and enemies named Catra, Mantenna (I'd like to see his man-tenna), Scorpia, and Entrapta.

In 1990, a new line of toys required a new series: .He-Man moves from Eternia to Primus, where struggles against Skeletor and his army of mutants.

In 2002, yet another series appeared, with another toyline. Back on Eternia, He-Man fights Skeletor and his Snake-People,

There was a live action movie, Masters of the Universe, in 1987. Dolph Lundgren (top photo) played a He-Man who somehow ends up on Earth and befriends two 1980s teens, Kevin and Julie (Robert Duncan McNeill, later of Star Trek: Voyager, Courtney Cox, later of Friends). Critics jeered.

A new movie version has been announced several times over the years. Professional surfer Laird Hamilton and more recently Kellan Lutz have been mentioned as potential future He-Men.

"Half the people here are guest workers from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Last night I met a very cute boy from Bangladesh on Grindr. He never met a black guy before.
The full story, with nude photos and sexual content, is on Tales of West Hollywood

Jul 17, 2016

You probably remember Chris Colfer as Kurt Hummel, the gay kid on Glee. He is still acting (in 2015 he played the young Noel Coward), and producing, but arguably his main claim to fame today is the juvenile fantasy series Land of Stories. The first, Land of Stories: The Wishing Spell, appeared in 2012, and shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, probably because of the name recognition.

Other books in the series, Land of Stories: The Enchantress Returns (2013), Land of Stories: A Grimm Warning (2014), and Land of Stories: Beyond the Kingdoms (2015), have also done well.

A gay author who played a gay person on tv and supports innumerable gay charities, from It Gets Better to the Trevor Project to Uprising of Love (for LGBT Russians)? Obviously he would make gay people an unremarkable part of his fictional world.

Obviously.

Right?

Um...

The premise is well known from such properties as The 10th Kingdom and Once Upon a Time: fairy tales are real, historically accurate depictions of events that occurred in a parallel reality. Teenage twins Alex and Connor (a boy and a girl) find themselves in Fairy World, and change the course of both fairy and human history. Let's go through a run-down of the major characters;

Alex dates a boy named Rook, and Connor dates a girl named Bree. Next!

That leaves a couple of very minor characters who don't mention any specifically heterosexual interests.

There isn't even any room for a Dumbledore to be gay and closeted and come out after the fact.

There aren't even any potential gay subtexts, as every major relationship is carefully organized into a boy-girl pattern.

Let's review:

A gay author who played a gay person on tv and supports innumerable gay charities has written a series of juvenile fantasy novels in which every single character of consequence is firmly and undeniably identified as heterosexual.

Hey, Uncle Tom...um, I mean Chris, I thought you supported gay kids' right to exist?

It was easy to find the gay connection in my father's parents, Grace and Lloyd Davis and Frank Jackson. There were anecdotes, photographs of men in swimsuits, newspaper articles, and the geneology research of my Cousin Eva.

My mother's parents, not so much. Grandpa Prater left only a few photos of Kentucky relatives, no letters, no books. He's not mentioned in old newspapers.

How can I tell if he experienced same-sex romance, or had gay friends, or even knew what "gay" meant?

All I have are the bare biographical facts and a few of my mother's memories:

1. Tony was born on May 9th, 1902 on rural eastern Kentucky. He was the youngest of 12 children, all of whom eventually married.

2. His 7th-great grandfather was the famous Tudor poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547), who wrote an unabashedly homoerotic elegy on the death of his friend, the Duke of Richmond (son of Henry VIII). But Tony didn't know that. The Family Bible went back only three generations.

3. As a boy, Tony used to go fishing and hunting with his older brothers, Elias, Repse, Silas, and Graydon. Not for sport -- for food.

4. Tony liked school. Unusual for a country boy of the era, he continued past 8th grade and graduated from high school in 1921. He was on the boxing and wrestling teams, and his favorite subject was music. He played the banjo and the guitar.

5. On October 6, 1922, he married 17-year old Grace, from the village of Pyramid. It's possible that her father had some down-low experiences, but certainly Tony didn't know about them.

All of Gracie's brothers and sisters eventually got married, except her baby brother Henry (1912-1985), who became her favorite, and the only one to visit when they moved to Indiana later.

6. From 1922 to 1942, Tony and Grace lived in a cabin near his parents in Gunlock, Kentucky. They had eleven children. Three died in infancy, one as a teenager

7. It was a gender-polarized world. The women were in charge of cooking, raising the babies, going to church, and believing in ghosts. Men worked when they could, but mostly they hung out, gambling, drinking, and shooting guns. Tony was especially close to his cousin, Crit Handshoe.

7. In 1942, Cousin Crit, Tony, and their families moved north to a farm near Garrett Indiana, where there were factory jobs. Tony went to work for Electric Motors, and stayed there until he retired in 1967.

8. When my mother was growing up, the house had no electricity or running water. It never had a bathroom.

The living room was cluttered with pictures, including one that showed Jesus on the cross if you looked at it one way, and the Ascension if you looked at it another way. Very Catholic, very unusual for fundamentalist Protestants. And very muscular.

9. In 1965, Tony suffered two great losses. Grace died, and Cousin Crit moved to North Manchester, Indiana to live with his daughter, leaving the Old House abandoned.

10. When I was a kid, Tony scared me. He was always carrying a gun, he smelled of whiskey, and his Eastern Kentucky accent was very, very thick:

11. When Uncle Paul got married and moved out in 1969, the house was empty, except for Tony and Uncle Ed. The two men lived and ate and drank together, day after day, week after week, for the next nine years, until Tony died.

12. He died in December 1978, about six months after I figured it out. I hadn't told anyone but my brother. There was no way he could have known. But would he have understood? Would he think of Uncle Henry, or Cousin Crit, or the men who sat around all day, back in the hills, gambling and drinking and shooting their guns?

The Philistine warrior Goliath was BIG: nine feet nine inches (enough about the nine feet, let's hear about the six inches). His suit of armor weighted 125 pounds. He challenged King Saul and the Israelites, but they were too scared to approach him.

The shepherd David agreed to fight him, but the sword and armor was too bulky, so he took his clothes off and fought with just a slingshot. He immobilized the giant, then rushed up with a sword and decapitated him.

Don't read too far, though, since in 2 Samuel we discover that David didn't do the job at all; it was Elhanan the Bethlehemite.

The story of David and Goliath in 1 Samuel was a mainstay of Sunday school classes, probably because it showed a little guy triumphing over a big guy. And because it's rather fun to imagine a nude, muscular shepherd boy striding across the battlefield, his penis swinging, the warriors all gazing in awe at his beauty.

The Biblical writers probably intended for David to be well into adulthood, in his late twenties, but artistic depictions generally make him 14-15. And leave his pants on, as in this painting by French artist Gabriel Ferrier (1847-1914)

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) made him the right age, but upped the clothing, giving him a tunic and pants.

This Italian engraving by Marcantoni Raimondi (1480-1534) gives David a massive body and a penis, with a cloak flapping behind him.

Most of the artistic depictions of David and Goliath come from the late Renaissance and Baroque eras. Going by the hair and face, you would expect this nude David in Zurich to be Baroque, too, but it's actually by Ivar Johnsson, erected in 1921.

Michelangelo's David (1501-1504) is the most famous statue in the world. No Goliath around, just the nude, amazingly beautiful David, his cloak in his hand, his bag of stones at his feet, frozen at a pivotal moment of his life.

There are replicas in many cities, including Antwerp, Buffalo, Mexico City, Philadelphia, and Montevideo.

And in the living rooms of about a million gay men of a certain age, who used it to communicate gay identity in the years before Stonewall.

When Gay Was Unspoken

Beefcake, male bonding, and gay symbolism in the movies, tv programs, books, toys, and comics of a Baby Boomer childhood. Some autobiographical stories and stories about beefcake around the world.

Note: Most posts are about how gay people can find meaning in homophobic or heterosexist texts. If you don't want to hear about that, stay away. No profanity, insults, anti-gay slurs, name-calling,or homophobia allowed. You will be blocked, and comments on the post will be disabled.